I didn’t write last week because I was out of town. Here is a recap of the last two weeks.

As I wrote about in the last post, my Mom was here to visit and watch Charlie since he had the week off (daycare closed for spring break) and we still had to work. It was a rainy week, but Charlie and Grandma made the most of it.

That Saturday we drove to Ohio to take Grandma home and to witness the eclipse in the totality path. Charlie had a blast playing at my parents’ house. The eclipse was incredible, well worth the trip. It didn’t get as dark as I expected, it was more like twilight. Something I’m probably (hopefully!) going to remember for the rest of my life. It was nice to get some family time, too.

The day after the eclipse we took a drive down to Holmes County (Amish country) to visit Colonial Homestead, a hand tool store owned and operated by Dan Raber. They have probably the best collection of traditional hand tools in the midwest, if not all of the United States. Dan is knowledgable, helpful, and friendly. I bought some holdfasts made by a local blacksmith, a Millers Falls low angle block plane, a large gouge, and The Guide to Woodworking with Kids by Doug Stowe.

Dan said he works with local schools to assemble sets of hand tools and kid-sized benches for their sloyd classes. They start in 2nd grade! Inspiring.

Dan had copies of Emmet van Driesche‘s Greenwood Spoon Carving and had read Emmet’s other book, Carving out a Living on the Land. Emmet is a friend of mine, so it was cool to see his book there.

I’m intrigued by these axes and this is a reminder to myself that I need to look them up in Eric Sloane’s A Museum of Early American Tools. I also liked these smaller benches with removable legs and plan to build one with a 3″ thick oak board. Perhaps with two sets of legs, one longer and one shorter.

We also went to the Guggisberg cheese factory and Lehman’s Hardware, where I got a 9×13 cast iron pan. I think it will make great pizza and focaccia.

It was plowing time in Amish country. So many teams of horses out plowing the fields. Cool to see. It was also a beautiful warm day, and every Amish schoolhouse we drove by (we took the back roads) had the yards filled with children enjoying the sun. Lots of baseball games happening, too.

I took the opportunity while we were at my parents’ house to back up my pre-2008 digital photo library. Everything post-2008 was already backed up on a drive I have in NY, but I was missing pre-2008. Glad I got it before that computer crashed (one of the original Intel-based iMacs). I also found my old OPML of circa-2007 blog feed subscriptions.

We drove back home on Wednesday. I’m thankful that Charlie is a pretty good traveler. Most of the credit for that goes to Amanda, who sits with him in the back set on longer trips to keep him company.

Hectic catch up days at work on Thursday and Friday, then a birthday party for one of Charlie’s friends on Friday evening. Afterward we got dinner with some friends and kept the kids out later than we should have, but they had a good time.

Signs of spring in the yard:

Not pictured: The peonies, rhubarb, and lilac producing buds!

This week a friend sent me a photo of a swing set he just built for his kids from my plans. There are now 5 of these in existence in 4 US states. It makes me so happy to know there are lots of kids enjoying them.

Saturday morning was gymnastics, then I felt motivated to do some cooking. I made two kinds of tomatillo salsa (avocado salsa verde and tomatillo arbol chile salsa), refried beans from scratch, and chicken fajitas.

Later I put a new gauge and washers on a CO2 regulator and tried my hand at carbonating various liquids: Water, grapefruit juice, and margaritas. While we were in Ohio I mentioned off-hand to my Dad that I was thinking about getting a CO2 tank to force carbonate things (you can only do water in a SodaStream… anything else ends up in a huge mess, which I know from firsthand experience), and it turns out he had a 5lb tank in the garage that someone he knew was getting rid of, and it just needed a new gauge for the regulator. Thanks, Dad!

I’m still getting the hang of how to carbonate different liquids and what PSI works best for water vs juice vs cocktails, but I’m excited to sip fizzy cocktails on the porch this summer, and maybe even fizzy cold brew coffee.

It took me two tries to get the water carbonated how we like it (halfway between regular seltzer and Hal’s). The grapefruit juice was fun because it had a softer, almost velvety mouthfeel. Smaller carbonation bubbles compared to water. The test margarita was tasty, though I prefer it without ice, as pouring it over ice immediately released the carbonation. Perhaps I need to slowly add the ice after pouring? We’ll see.

Sunday Charlie slept in much later than usual, then woke up sick. He had a fever most of the day and just wanted to snuggle with one of us on the couch for most of the day. I took the morning shift while Amanda went horseback riding, then after lunch I worked outside for a while. I repurposed (planed and cut) old lumber to make a mud kitchen for Charlie, which we’ll assemble next weekend. Then I made three new french cleat holders: First aid kit + paper towel holder, squares holder, and jig saw holder.

By the time I was wrapping up, I was more tired than usual and started to get a headache. Amanda felt the same way, so we are probably getting whatever Charlie has. Yikes. I decided to muster the rest of my energy and go to the grocery store to stock up in case we all wake up with fevers tomorrow. Let’s hope we don’t.

Going to be a shorter post tonight. I’m tired from a day of shoveling compost and dirt to finish the garden beds project. We ended the day by sowing peas, radishes, spinach, and cilantro.

Check out how nice our compost looks! The compost bins were one of our early pandemic projects. I’ve already used it all once and started fresh, so this batch is made up of grass/leaves/kitchen scraps between 6 months and 2 years old.

My Mom is here to visit for the week. (Hi, Mom!) Charlie’s daycare is on spring break (matches up with the local schools), so she is hanging out with Charlie while Amanda and I work. (Thank you, Mom! We really appreciate it!)

I put those notes to Mom above because I guarantee she’ll see them. She holds the top number of comments on this blog by a wide margin.

Charlie and I picked her up at White Plains airport, and there is a little observation area on the third floor outside of security, so we got to watch her plane come in. Charlie loved it.

We did an Easter Egg hunt with Charlie this morning. He loved that, too.

We’ve been enjoying the longer days and warmer weather. Lots of wood walks, and Charlie is starting to venture further from the paths to climb the big rocks and to throw smaller ones in the creek. I have a feeling this is going to be Charlie’s Summer ™️.

The Forsythias are starting to bloom! My favorite.

Trying out a new watering solution in the garden this year. The past two years I used wick irrigation (see 1 and 2), but this year I want to try using Ollas. I’m hoping to cut down on the issues I had with wick irrigation (mosquitos in the open buckets, wicks drying out, too much air evaporation.)

I didn’t want to buy them, so I took an chipped terra cotta pot and siliconed a saucer in it. Letting it dry overnight tonight. As long as it proves to be waterproof, I’ll bury it and fill it from the small hole in the top. (And make 5 more)

The general idea is that terra cotta is porous, so water will dissipate out into the soil when the soil is dry.

I did our taxes this week. Got the car cleaned and house cleaned. Did lots of laundry. Charlie got a haircut.

I noticed while driving on Saturday that it was possible to identify large swaths of maple trees in forested land because they are budding out and look red while everything else is still brown. I wonder if any mapping companies are using things like that to build forest datasets? You of course can’t tell the particular species that way, but knowing general percentages of types of trees might be useful.

There was a point in college where I thought seriously about going down the biohacking route. I was tracking lots of different things for a year and a half. I eventually stopped because going to the next level would have required constant monitoring of what I ate and how I exercised, tons of spreadsheets and research, and lots of time getting labs done. I’d rather skip all that and fill it with more fulfilling things than spend all that time on stuff I hate just to eke out 5 more years at the end. I guess if that is something that brings you fulfillment than it is a win/win, but it isn’t for me.

Home server update for the week:

• I have Syncthing running (basically Dropbox without Dropbox – syncs files from designated directories between multiple computers/servers)
  • This required 3x the time I expected and reminded me how much elbow grease you need to get things to work on Linux (Debian in this case.) Even things I thought would be simple like reformatting a drive to get it to mount turned into hour-long ordeals.
    • Sorry, Richard, I meant to write GNU/Linux.
• Daily, weekly, and monthly backups are enabled. They write to the same machine right now, so I need to configure external backups next.
• I downloaded every ebook we’ve ever purchased from Amazon Kindle, stripped the DRM, and put them all on the FreedomBox, which runs Calibre. I wanted to make a digital family library, much like our physical one. Now we can log in, select the book and the format we want, and Calibre will convert it on the fly and download it to our device.
• I started archiving my Likes and Bookmarks using ArchiveBox, and I set up a script to add newly saved links to the archive daily. ArchiveBox does not yet run on Debian, so for now I’m running the tool on a Mac and mirroring the archive to the FreedomBox server, available publicly here: https://grimmett.xyz/share/archivebox/
  • More to configure here, such as automating adding more sources, fine-tuning the settings, and waiting for the 0.8.0 release to unblock an issue I hit with the tool parsing JSON imports. Once resolved, I probably won’t need my scripts anymore and I’ll be able to use the built-in scheduling feature.
    • Twitter bookmarks, Mastodon bookmarks, Instagram saved posts, things I link to in my blog posts and digital garden, Are.na links

What’s next?

• Maybe setting up an email server!
• Dynamic DNS. Probably using GnuDIP.
• Adding a wifi plug so I can remotely cycle the power if the server crashes and I can’t SSH in to restart.
  • Automating this would be cool. Ping the server every 5 minutes, and if (4?) consecutive pings are bad, cycle the power. I think the only hurdle here is that my plugs don’t have an official API, but there is a community reverse-engineered project written in Python.
• Configuring an external backup solution and getting another 2TB drive to clone locally.

We’ve all been sick with a cold this week. Charlie got it first and recovered the fastest. Amanda got it next and was down Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I got it Saturday afternoon and was down most of Sunday. Hopefully I’ll recover quickly.

Thursday and Friday after work/daycare, and Saturday after dinner Charlie and I hung out a lot to give Amanda some time to rest. We went to the library to pick up some books we reserved (Charlie had some requests!), two different playgrounds, the grocery store, the riverfront walk, and an ice cream shop. Charlie’s new ice cream order is chocolate with a cherry on top. (I think he picked that one up from Trash Truck.)

One of my favorite things is toddler-led walks. He chooses the pace and where we go. I follow his lead and cues. I love how much he notices and how curious he is. Afterward at dinner he recounted to us everything we did and saw, quite accurately.

Charlie is big into helping. Here he is helping make breakfast while Amanda is on her way back from the gym.

Here he is holding some daffodils that he and Amanda cut for our mantle:

As we start the engine, so we start our days.

I’m loving the griddle we put on one half of the grill. It is nice to quickly cook some veggies while grilling some meat. Monday we did a pork tenderloin with some zucchini and squash while rice cooked inside.

I finished restoring a cutting board that was my Mamaw’s. My Dad grabbed it when they were cleaning out the house after Papaw moved in with my aunt and uncle. She’s been gone almost 11 years now.

First I had to glue some sections back together. It fell apart.

Then I sanded down the pretty deep knife cuts and general wear.

Finished with my standard beeswax + jojoba oil blend. Started using it in the kitchen the next day.

Keeping with the woodworking trend: I made more french cleat holders this week after work:

• a chisel/gouge/hook knife/carving knife holder
• measure tape holder
• Foredom rotary tool holder
• a cord holder so I don’t have to go hunting behind my Shopsmith for the cord
• clamp holder
• holder for Hand drills, push drill, and hand brace

I’m particularly excited about the Foredom being hung, because I ran the speed control pedal under the bench, so now I can just turn it on and use it rather than spend 5 mins getting it set up for a 30 second task.

I’m trying to tee projects up for myself in the workshop so I can jump on them when I have a little bit of free time. The next one is adding holes for bench dogs and holdfasts in the workbench, as well as making the bench dogs themselves.

I’m thinking a lot again about first aid kits. I’m putting one together for the workshop. I plan to write about this soon with more detail on what I have in the kit in the car, my backpack, and my workshop.

Seeds are coming along nicely. I’m now fertilizing them and have an oscillating fan on them daily to start the hardening process/prevent them from getting leggy.

We didn’t make much progress on the garden beds this week. The weather turned cold and being sick this weekend put a damper on things. We did line the bottom of the beds with the old plywood from the previous ones, plus some cardboard and sticks. Next step is shoveling in compost and dirt.

I heard back from the fence contractor, so hoping to get that project rolling soon.

I went to a friend’s birthday party on Saturday afternoon at The Vinyl Room in Beacon. Amanda and Charlie were feeling rough and had to stay home, but the cold hadn’t quite hit me yet so I went. Cool place and nice to meet some of their other friends and make new connections, like Ryan who owns an outdoor shop in Tannersville called Camp Catskill.

I bought a FreedomBox a couple months ago to dip my toe into the self-hosting world. I thought setting it up would be a whole thing, so I let it sit in the box. This weekend, since we were all sitting around with a cold, I figured I’d get it out and give it a try.

Setting it up was a lot easier than I expected. I had it up and running with less than an hour of active time (though lots of waiting for booting, updates, etc.) I have it running at https://box.grimmett.co/ and I set up some of the basic services, including a WordPress site.

It still blows my mind that visiting that address accesses a tiny little box currently sitting on the buffet in my living room.

Next step is adding some external storage, picking a more permanent location in my house, and configuring more of the services (for which I need that storage.) Then I need to figure out dynamic DNS in case my IP address changes.

I tried to connect an APFS-formatted drive today, but went down the Debian rabbit hole of having to compile my own drivers. I messed something up and ended up breaking the FreedomBox service. Thank goodness for automatic snapshots. I was able to load a previous snapshot, reboot, and get it back up and running.

Related, I finally got Backblaze back up and running, and while I was going through old drives to see what I could wipe and repurpose, I backed up my various machines and put a recent dump of photos on the photos drive.

I’m really proud that I have accessible photo backups from 16 years ago, which is when I got my first laptop. Anything before that is still on the computer at my parents’ house, and I’ll have to remember to clone that the next time I visit.

I had a nice conversation with Chris Glass over email this week.

I like Chris’s bookmarks and am slowly working on moving my bookmark archive from the past 16 years over to my digital garden.

I like the layout of Chris’s blogroll. The grouping + context is nice.

He inspired me to update my own /now page more regularly.

Jon Elordi started doing week notes! 🎉

Rough week at work. Not much I can say about it.

From last year: https://cagrimmett.com/2023/03/27/week-of-march-20-2023/

Amanda and I were sick then, too. We had strep. We also started seeds that week.

In 2022: https://cagrimmett.com/2022/03/26/week-of-march-21/

We started seeds then, too! And Charlie and I went to the same playground. Fun to see how much he has grown.

The warm weather and extra daylight at the end of the day has been a welcome change. Every night this week Amanda, Charlie, and I spent some time outside after daycare/work and before dinner. We are dinner outside multiple times this week, went for walks, cooked dinner on the grill, got our outdoor seating out, rode bikes, and played in the yard and at the playground. It was good for all of us.

Amanda found a battery-powered motorcycle for free on the Buy Nothing Facebook group, and I replaced the 6V battery and sourced a charger to get it working again. Charlie loves to cruise around on it!

I worked from Automattic’s NoHo office on Friday. I went in for a meeting, but I like going in once a month or so for a change of pace. Los Tacos 1, right around the corner, is very good. Astor Wines is also right up the block, so I usually stop in and restock on stuff I can’t find up in Westchester. This time it was orange shrubb.

I made more French cleat tool holders in the shop after work this week.

• Air nailer
• Air hose
• Router bits
• Axe and adze
• Pencil sharpener
• Clock and dust collection hose
• Draw knife and spokeshave
• Drills/drivers, bits, and charger/batteries (I also added a magnet bar for my most-used bits a couple days later)
• Files and rasps

I also made a workbench for Charlie that hangs on the French cleats so that as he grows we can just lift it up. I had my own bench in my Dad’s workshop growing up and have fond memories of the countless hours I spent out there, and I want Charlie to have the same option. I put a magnet bar up with the tools we got him for Christmas, and the old vise I had. He’s played with it a lot in the past couple days. Makes my heart happy.

I’m trying out toe spacers and one of those magnet nose bands to improve your nose breathing at night. Slowly trying to make improvements. Following up on a previous one I mentioned, the probiotics are helping quite a bit.

The seeds we started last weekend are doing great. 80% of them have sprouted already. Rosemary and the scotch bonnets are the holdouts.

This was a yardwork-focused weekend. We disassembled the 4 year old garden beds that were starting to fall apart and built new ones. Instead of elevated like the previous ones, we opted for regular ground-level raised beds so that Charlie can help more easily. Also, now that we got rid of the groundhogs, we expect fewer pest issues.

We went with 12ft beds (previously 8ft) to space things out a little more, plus and extra 4×4 box to grow some luffas in.

Yes, we know the fence is falling apart. I’m waiting on a contractor to get back to me so I can finish filing the permits with the city. Yes, I hate that we need a permit to replace a fence. No, I’m not going to go rogue because I’m pretty sure we have a neighbor that will check because another neighbor recently got fined for something similar.

Next steps: Lining the bottoms with cardboard and sticks, layering on compost and coconut coir, then shoveling the dirt back in.

I also secured Charlie’s swingset with some 24″ metal spikes driven sideways at an angle and attached them with conduit straps.

I needed to rent a UHaul to move the 2x12x12 boards and some wood lattice that I’m replacing on my deck. I originally wanted a pickup truck, van, or trailer, but neither Home Depot nor UHaul had them available. The only thing available was s 15′ box truck, so I rolled with it.

Unfortunately I had an awful experience. Their app is terrible and errors out constantly. First it didn’t show my reservation, which I finally fixed by finding a tool that helps you associate an order with your account. Then the “mobile pickup” option did not accept upload of any the photos it required. Three phone calls and hour later I finally got the truck. Drop-off/mobile return was the same headache, but only took 30 minutes.

Software and AI struggle the most where it has to interact with the physical world. The physical world is messy and does not follow clean, machine-readable rules like the computing world. We still need humans to help us navigate AFK.

At least Charlie thought the truck was cool.

That’s all I’ve got this week. See you next week 👋

p.s. if you read this regularly, drop me a note (email). I’d love to hear from you because I have little idea who actually reads these posts. I mostly write them for my future self, but I like hearing from other readers, too. Thank you in advance!

Lots of rain this week, so we did indoor activities like going to the library, going to the grocery store, and making ambulances out of boxes.

This box is still in our living room, though now Charlie calls it his “garage” and likes to hide underneath it while we walk around the house and call his name. Eventually he pops out and giggles hysterically.

We also went to gymnastics and a birthday party for one of Charlie’s friends.

Another activity was starting seeds. Charlie did the dirt scooping and watering. I’m learning from last year’s seed starting mistakes:

• more lights (shifted four bars to one shelf instead of one per)
• lights closer to the seeds (raised up the soil and heating pads)
• warmer location (basement instead of my drafty office)
• lights on a timer (sunrise to sunset)

Workshop upgrade progress report

I put in the dust collection system! It is a 2HP Harbor Freight dust collector that I took off the stand and mounted to the wall. Instead of the dust bag, which doesn’t collect fine dust, I used a canister filter, which does. Hoses run through the rafters over to my Shopsmith area and to the work bench.

I got a decent amount of karma on Reddit when I posted about my realization that deli quart containers can work as adapters on 4in hoses, blast gates, and splitters.

I also made and hung the french cleats and started building tool holders. I love how this works and am excited about it. More tool holders in progress this week.

I spent more time than I’d like last week figuring out the permitting process for Peekskill so we can get our fence replaced.

I’m slowly improving my Shortcuts actions. My Like shortcut and Bookmark shortcut are smoother and more flexible now. The same shortcut works across browsers and devices, and takes input either from the share sheet or the clipboard. I’m now posting bookmarks to my digital garden site, reducing my dependence on third party subscriptions. I need to clean up and rethink how they are displayed, but the data is there.

The next step is automating importing my are.na, Twitter, Mastodon, and Instagram bookmarks. If you do this, hit me up.

Related, it turns out consistently tagging disparate pieces of content using AI without pre-defining the tags is a non-trivial problem. Great thread from Simon Willison on this.

I’m doing very little pleasure reading right now. I’m working a lot in the workshop after Charlie goes to bed, which is when I’d normally be reading. In general, reading less doesn’t seem great, but I’m replacing it with something fulfilling and productive, which I feel good about.

Looking back at two years ago and one year ago. Charlie has grown so much in the past year! It is interesting to see how my week notes have evolved. Very work and life dependent. Also, I need to get a move on getting my weather station replaced.

Amanda and I have predictions on what is going on with Kate Middleton. Amanda thinks she is having a mental breakdown, I think she served William with divorce papers over his cheating and the royal family doesn’t know what to do about it.

My birthday was this week! I wrote a post about it.

I’m continuing to work on my workshop upgrade as much as I can. This week I:

• Added some light finish to my bench top (a blend of linseed oil and beeswax). I decided one coat is enough. It is just a workbench and as soon as I start using it the top will get dinged up anyway.
  • Using it so far has been great! It is very solid, a huge improvement over what was there before.
• Added weather stripping inside the doors to help the heater out and keep out some dampness
• Added some missing light switch covers
• Added a test set of French cleats to a side wall
• Made my first tool holder to go on the cleats: A holder for my lathe tools.
  • I used my Shopsmith in drill press mode for this for the first time in two years. I also set up the router table and got out the air brad nailer.
• Started modifying and installing my dust collector. Post forthcoming.
• Put an old style flexible spout and vent cap on my new diesel can because the new style “no spill” control spouts are terrible and so hard to use. Holding up the can with one hand while you squeeze the spout with your thumb instead of using your second hand to support and guide the nozzle is difficult. Full 5gal cans are heavy! After using it three times I was so frustrated that I ordered a replacement kit.

Things are starting to come together nicely and I’m pretty happy about it! I’m getting excited about working in there more.

Posts also forthcoming on the general upgrade project and the new workbench, and the French cleats.

I met my coworker and friend Fernando and his girlfriend Gabriele for dinner on Friday. They live in Brazil but are visiting NYC for a week. We went to Lombardi’s, the first pizza place in the US. Afterward we had drinks and popcorn chicken at Double Chicken Please. There we lucked out and got offered a table in the Coop, which had a 5 hour wait, but someone had just canceled. I had the Waldorf Salad (scotch, walnut bitters, celery, apple, ginger ale) and the Americano Americano (Campari, vermouth, coffee liqueur, branca menta, soda). I thought the Americano Americano was clever because it combines the Americano coffee drink with the Americano cocktail. And it was tasty! On the popcorn chicken: If a place is well-known for their bar snacks, you have to get them. The chicken did not disappoint.

Saturday was a full day. Charlie had gymnastics in the morning, then some of the gymnastics crew went to Dunkin Donuts for a snack and then Home Depot for the kids’ workshop. This month they built a butterfly house. Later that afternoon we went to a friend’s new job celebration party in Lake Peekskill. We brought esquites. There Charlie ate his first taco! Until now he would only eat the constituent parts instead of the whole thing together. I think the sour cream sold it for him… sour cream is one of his favorite foods.

Sunday was sunny and warm, which was a nice change of pace. Charlie played outside while I did some more work on the workshop upgrade and Amanda went horseback riding. We also installed a handle on the workshop door at Charlie’s height so he can open and close the door himself.

Challenging week at work. You might have seen various articles about Automattic from places like 404 Media this week. I won’t say anything other than the entire situation sucks. Like many other things in life, before you form your opinion you might want to consider assuming positive intent.

The big event two weeks ago was a snow storm on Tuesday. We got 11″ of snow here in Peekskill, the most in the region. Daycare was closed, along with everything else, so Amanda and I switched off hanging out with Charlie while the other worked. No snow days is a downside of remote work! (You still won’t catch me going into an office any time soon, though.)

Charlie woke me up that morning by saying, “Daddy, it NO-ing!”

Charlie and I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk twice, and took the sled out in the woods. Otherwise we hunkered down and stayed warm.

Charlie woke me up the next morning by saying, “Daddy, it Valentine’s Day!” – We’d been hyping it up all week, making cards, etc. He had a blast.

My parents came to visit for the holiday weekend on Friday. Dad helped me a lot with the workshop upgrade project:

• Saturday we finished putting in the rest of the insulation and installed the diesel heater (my birthday present from my parents)
  • I’ll put together a post once I finish the rest of the upgrades, but the heater is great. At one point we had it up to 70F in the minimally-insulated shed and had to turn the power down.
• Sunday we went to pick up some items from an auction and some plywood from Home Depot with their truck, then framed in the workbench, routed out spots for the legs and vise, then biscuit joined and glued the three pieces of the top together.
• Monday we put in the legs and shelving for the workbench, put a couple pieces of plywood up on the walls, and put in some electrical outlets above the new bench.

It was great to have my parents here. Always nice to spend time with them. Charlie loves it, too.

Wednesday night I hung lights above the bench and installed my vises.

More on that auction: An old woodturner in Fishkill passed away and his family ran an estate sale. I ended up not winning any of the wood he had roughed out and stacked in his shop because the bids went higher than I was willing to pay, but when I went to pick up the ShopVac that I won, I asked if they had any wood that didn’t sell. I lucked out! They forgot to post some of it to the online auction, so I offered cash on the spot and took it off their hands. 🪵 🙌

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we did some clean up and gave away some stuff on Buy Nothing. For the unfamiliar, there are local Facebook groups where you can post things you want to give away and people claim them. We gave away a giant beanbag chair, our old couch, and some baby stuff. We also claimed and picked up a toy piano for Charlie.

Friday morning we had a family breakfast date at the coffee shop.

We did the clean up to make space for reconfiguring the finished half of the basement into a half work/half art space for Amanda. Her desk was already down there, but we put up some bookshelves and moved her workspace around a little bit. Today (Sunday) is organizing.

Saturday afternoon and early evening Charlie and I met up with Jeremy and Miles to take the train to Cold Spring and hang out for a while. We went to the bookstore, playground, and dinner. Lots of running around outside, too. Everyone had fun.

I finished The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler this week. Good, fun, easy read.

One other cool thing this week: One of my posts was featured in the Stack Overflow newsletter!

Okay, I’m off to do some more work in my warm workshop. I’m putting up more plywood today, which I’ll later hang French cleats on.

I decided to go forward with the workshop upgrades, so that has been taking most of my time outside of work this week.

The current plan:

• Insulate with radiant barrier.
• Diesel heater for heat.
• Put a bench along the full back wall. 31.5″ deep, set up 36″ high. Top made out of laminated 2x4s on edge. Shelf underneath high enough for bins to slide underneath for storage.
  • Mounting my carpenter’s vice flush with the front of the bench for better full-length support. Probably left site, 1/4 of the way in.
  • Standard bench vice is probably going on the right side.
  • 3 4×4 feet in the front, 2×4 nailers on the back and side walls.
• Instead of a flip cart for the miter saw, I’ll build a platform to put the miter saw on top of my Shopsmith and use the tables on it to support the longer pieces. Saving the floor space.
• French cleats on the walls for storage.
• I may end up getting rid of the green cart/locker I’m currently using for storage. Every bit of floor space helps!

I spent a lot of time this weekend glueing together 2x4s and planing them for the bench top. After not pre-planing and jointing them in the first section, I decided to do the 14 remaining boards, which led to a much better result for the second section. I guess the first one will go in the back. As I write this, the third section is still curing in the basement. (This glue needs 55F to cure and it is in the 20F range here at night.)

I’m exhausted and sore, but I’m rushing to get the last section planed before the snow hits on Tuesday.

I’ve put up a third of the radiant barrier so far.

More future workshop upgrade projects in my digital garden.

Charlie loves Home Depot. Good thing we’ve been three times this week.

Crocuses are starting to bloom!

Getting steadily earlier each year, according to my unscientific records:

The weather was sunny and warm on Friday, so we picked up pizzas and met up with another family at the playground after work on Friday. The kids loved it. Nice to have the days growing long enough to do that again.

Amanda and I started watching Griselda and we like it. So our two shows right now are True Detective and Griselda.

Charlie was home Monday and part of Wednesday because he was teething this week and had a cough in addition to the mouth pain. Unfortunately getting him to take any kind of medicine has been a struggle recently, so it was a tough couple of days for everyone.

He recovered by the end of the week and had a great Saturday: Gymnastics with some daycare friends in the morning, then a kids workshop at Home Depot where he got to build and paint a Valentine’s Card Box with some of the same friends. Panera afterward, then home for a much needed nap.

I got things started and Amanda helped Charlie finish. He loves using his tools.

Amanda and I had our friends Jeremy and Marie over for dinner on Saturday evening. I roasted a duck and used the rendered fat for roasting potatoes and sautéing green beans with garlic and breadcrumbs. Marie made kartoshka from her grandmother’s recipe, a Ukrainian truffle-like dessert that we all enjoyed. Afterward Amanda and J played some flute duets.

As I mentioned last week, I’m trying to improve my lathe turning skills. I realized that not using a skew is a serious skill deficiency, and in learning how to use one I found out that the 45 degree angle and straight edge make it pretty difficult to use for peeling and planing cuts. So I got a used Shopsmith-mounted grinder on eBay and reground my 1in skew to a smaller angle with a radius. It works much better now, and I used it exclusively to make this tool handle, without having a single catch. That might sound pretty normal to a seasoned turner, but it was a breakthrough for me.

I’m also proud of myself because I haven’t done much tool grinding or shaping. I started out with the bench grinder and got the profile I wanted, but found it hard to make a consistent bevel on a 1in tool and a 3/4in grinding wheel, so I cleaned it up on the disc sander.

Next steps:

• I ordered some grinding wheels from McMaster Carr, which was the only place that had the combo of 5″ wheel + 5/8 arbor I could find.
• I need to get some finer sand paper for the disc sander, or figure out another way to hone my tools.
• Write up my sharpening techniques on my digital garden for future me
• Perhaps I can mount the sharpening jig to the other side of the lathe for easy sharpening while I turn to keep things in top shape.
• Figure out better storage close to the Shopsmith. I like the bottom shelf I have, but the sawdust and wood shavings are too much. Perhaps I need to enclose it.

Charlie climbing and checking out the lathe.

Before this he and I were looking at different kinds of maps (some local, some national parks) and drawing our own on paper. He is a lot of fun.

I’ve been thinking a lot about building a new bench, moving things around for better layout, and insulating/heating the shed so working out there in the winter isn’t so brutal. Some things on the top of my mind:

• Diesel heater or small wood stove?
  • Diesel heaters heat up quickly and turn off instantly, so I don’t need to start a fire and worry about it while i’m not in the shed.
  • Wood stoves are quieter and put out a nice radiant heat.
• Foam board or fiberglass for insulation?
  • Both are kind of annoying to install, but foam board might be less itchy.
• Can I make a flip-top cart with a router one one side and miter saw on the other? That would minimize dedicated workbench space usage and help me get things out of the way if needed.
• I need to think about dust collection, but have no idea where to start.

More to come on this. I’m talking to my Dad, some friends, and reading a lot online.

I started using How to Draw Almost Every Day for some simple daily drawing prompts. I like it!

The Roberta’s frozen pizzas are the best frozen pizzas I’ve had. I don’t know what they do differently, but they are excellent. Great crust that crisps up in the oven and great flavor.

After not reading for most of January, I picked up The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler and am enjoying it so far.

So many courses and membership platforms with private log-in built on WordPress are trivially easy to circumvent because they don’t lock down access to the REST API endpoints.

Related, Vimeo’s domain-level privacy setting is also trivially easy to circumvent as long as you know which domain it is supposed to be embedded on. It relies on the referer header, which you can specify with curl’s –referer option.

If you make course or membership plugin, don’t forget to restrict REST API access for your post types to authenticated users!

I started a new ferment this week after bottling my gin & tonic seltzer last weekend. I’m making an imperial hard cider, flavored with some oak and calvados. Should be ready in a couple weeks.

I spent two days in Manhattan this week—Wednesday and Friday.

Wednesday was a “I need a change of scenery” day. Amanda and Charlie had plans with another mom and toddler after work/daycare, so I worked from the WeWork in Union Square (terrible place to be productive, but great kombucha), got lunch at Halal Guys (chicken over rice white sauce hot sauce), dinner at Soothr (khao soi sai ua), then walked up to Kalustyan’s and explored before going home. I picked up some tasty hot sauces. Since eating that Paqui One Chip Challenge at Christmas, my heat tolerance is much higher than before. I’m now using habanero sauces like I used to use Frank’s, and when I want to heat it up I’m now reaching for ghost pepper sauces. My current rotation: Marie Sharp’s green habanero, Woodstock Ghost Pepper, Melinda’s Red Savina and Bhut Jolokia. Next time I think I’ll try Marie Sharp’s Belizean Heat and the Woodstock Scorpion.

The next day I learned that Matt was hosting a happy hour at the Automattic office on Friday ahead of his upcoming sabbatical, so I decided to head in and work from the Automattic office in NoHo (Crosby St). I had lunch at George Motz’s Hamburger America (onion burger, coffee milk, and fries). It was excellent.

Amanda and I went on a date on Saturday! We went to Goosefeather. The food was excellent, but the service and ambiance left a bit to be desired. I’m trying to recreate one of the cocktails I had.

Last week I mentioned some of my current interests in the shop. Here’s how I’m moving forward:

• I got out an old book I have on wood turning to revisit the basics. I also checked a newer one out of the library to compare.
• Found some resources online about wood turning.
• Watched ebay for a bent gouge and a grinder that will attach to my Shopsmith. Won both!

I read a recent study about certain strains of probiotics reducing acid reflux, which I suffer from. It renewed my interest in probiotics, so I’m taking some again. If you have some that have been particularly effective for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Sunday was a rare rainy weekend day where I had some gumption, so I organized the basement, replaced some pieces of the floating vinyl flooring that had cracked down there, and cleaned out the small basement fridge. Then made pork enchiladas with tomatillo salsa from our garden tomatillos for dinner.

Charlie helped with the crow bar.

Worked on some SQL optimization last week. It is insane how much faster integer comparisons are than string comparisons. This is where my lack of a computer science background makes me miss things other people might think is obvious.

We went to the library! We go every other week.

Charlie really likes Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. I love that he notices different things on the page than I notice. Reading with him is one of my favorite things.

The new season of True Detective is good, but not for the faint of heart. IMO it is more disturbing than the previous seasons.

The snow melted by the end of the day Tuesday because of all the rain we had. More is forecasted for this week though!

This has been a wild weather week around the US. On a single day, US folks on my team shared in Slack that they experienced tornados, flooding, heavy wind, and heavy snow. A couple days later there was more snow and extremely low temperatures.

If you don’t have backup plans for heat and some emergency preparations, now is probably a good time to start thinking about that. I don’t think this extreme weather is going to improve.

Charlie was home sick from daycare most of the week, and Amanda caught the bug as well. I was mostly spared except for some sore throat, but it did throw a wrench in the week nonetheless.

Working from home with a sick kid is tough. I work best when it is quiet and I’m alone, which makes it impossible to an eye on Charlie and get real work done. Unfortunately, Amanda’s work tends to be call-heavy, also impossible to do and keep an eye on Charlie. We trade off, so neither of us gets enough done.

Charlie recovered enough to daycare on Friday, but Amanda and I had dentist appointments. After mine, I took a walk down to Bruised Apple BooksArchived Link while Amanda finished her appointment. I picked up a couple Edward Abbey books and a book I’ve had my eye on there for over a year: The Internet Atlas by Richard Dinnick. Subtitle: Your indespensible guide to the best 1000 sites on the web. Published in 2000. I love flipping through the screenshots of the web 1.0 sites. I experienced them, but it is a reminder of what the web used to be like.

I spent a couple late nights working on a blog redesign. I have a few more templates to make before I move it over to this site.

The weekend was better. Saturday morning we took a trip up to Lagrangeville to pick up Amanda’s flute from a music shop where she had some maintenance work done on it. Saturday afternoon Charlie got a haircut (so handsome!), then he and I did some grocery shopping while Amanda got her nails done.

Sunday we all did some yardwork together (emptied and put away some straggler terra cotta pots, filled the bird feeders), I put up a pull-up bar on the back side of the swingset (not visible from the front, which is a win), then I made a mallet in the shop, and revived some dead tool batteries while Amanda and Charlie took a nap and baked banana bread.

New Year’s Day feels like the only real rest day we had during the holiday break.

• We made peanut butter bird seed pinecones for the birds.
• We took a walk in the woods.
• Charlie took a long nap and Amanda and I sat on the couch together for a while. I blogged and Amanda got ready for the week.
• I made pasta for dinner.

This week was back-to-work. Tuesday night we made pizza and calzones from the extra NYE dough. I’m really getting the hang of shaping the dough and using the Ooni.

My daily stretching and drawing resolution is going well. I’m staying on trackToo soon to see benefits IMO, but glad I’m sticking with it and it doesnt feel like too much of a drag.

We went to Feed the Birds! in Croton and got a new bird feeder. Charlie likes filling it up.

He also likes helping put out the recycling. He is generally a helpful guy.

Not a lot else to say about the rest of the week. We went back to work and kind of eased back in while a lot of people were still out. Amanda and I had a lunch date on Friday (Benny’s sandwiches at the waterfront). We re-joined the local wine shop’s wine club.

The east coast finally got some snow this weekend. We enjoyed playing in it. We started in the yard in the morning, then my friend Jon came over after naptime and we went for a walk in the woods. Charlie enjoyed the sled a lot more this year then he did last year.

Some snowy scenes.

I stumbled upon this and I absolutely love it. A cozy little place for a mouse or chipmunk to eat some nuts and seeds and keep out of the snow.

I feel fortunate that none of us have gotten sick this winter. Big difference compared to last year when we were sick all the time.

Taking care of an infant was physically difficult. Parenting a 2.5yo toddler is emotionally difficult. On one hand there are tons of meltdowns and independence struggles, then on the other hand they tell you they love you unprompted and very sweetly thank you for doing small everyday things for them.

Charlie’s use of function words has ramped up in the last couple weeks. They make his speaking sound a lot more natural. But he also still says things like “unga brella” for umbrella and “Magawine” for Madeline (which we’ve been reading a lot of), and it is super cute.

He amazes us and we are so proud of him, even if we go to bed emotionally exhausted every night. It can be, and is, both.

The end of both the autumn season and the calendar year. On the shortest day of the year we celebrated our friend Meg’s birthday at The Central, where her husband set up a surprise party and urged us all to get sitters and have a night out. We are glad we did. It was fun to be out with friends, sans kids, in a place where we’ve all been many times but in a completely different context. We dressed up, too!

We’ve been going to the library every other week or so to pick out new books with Charlie. This last time he confidently stated he wanted a book about firetrucks, so we asked the kind librarian to help us find firetruck books and they delivered. Charlie enjoyed one on the ride home.

We went back to Ohio for Christmas and had a nice trip.

The drive out was easy. Despite leaving late because we had a busy week and hadn’t packed much, the weather was nice and traffic light on the drive, so we made good time. Listened to Birdseye, Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky.

Some highlights from the trip:

• Making Dutch Babies on Christmas morning. We used Smitten Kitchen’s recipe and did one savory and one sweet.
• Making Sean Brock’s rabbit stew with black pepper dumplings recipe. We brought a rabbit from Hemlock Hill.
• Seeing Charlie play with his cousins.
• Charlie getting time with his grandparents and feeling completely comfortable at their house, opening up and being silly like he does at home.
• Working on a project with my Dad: Refinishing the top of an old work bench and mounting it to a cart with wheels. We took off about 1/8 of an inch of old wood with a power plane, evened it out with a belt sander, tightened the through bolts to squeeze everything back together, cut a straight edge, added a carpenter’s vice, and then put a mixture of beeswax and mineral oil on top.
• My cousins, uncle, and I eating Paqui One Chip Challenge chips. I eat a lot of hot stuff, but this was rough. It made me hiccup involuntarily for the first five minutes while I sweat like crazy.
• Playing the Four Letter Word Game.
• Learning and playing Tunk.

One of the bigger challenges this year is that Charlie got overstimulated and clingy at most of the bigger get-togethers we went to, so either Amanda or I spent a lot of 1:1 time with Charlie. It makes sense and is developmentally appropriate for 2.5 years old. We also think he is going through another leap right now because his language skills are increasing almost every day right now. His nap schedule was way off, too. Nonetheless, it is tiring for us and frustrating when we only see certain people once or twice a year and spend a huge chunk of that time not able to socialize. But we are reminding ourselves that this is a stage and we are thankful for the time we did get, and for the dedicated time with Charlie.

My cousin Ryan filled me in on Smokin’ Ed Currie. He is the one who cultivated the Carolina Reaper pepper and now has a new world’s hottest pepper: Pepper X. It apparently takes about 10 years to make a stable cross-breed chile.

On the way back from Ohio we stopped in Pittsburgh to visit our friends Erin and Tyler, which is becoming a tradition. Some highlights:

• Charlie and Gus playing outside with the chickens
• Charlie getting to pet some cats. We don’t have any pets, so he was thrilled and surprisingly gentle.
• Tyler gave me a couple nice pieces of black cherry wood to turn on the lathe.
• Erin shared some gardening advice and a book recommendation (The Old Way).
• Having a fantastic meal at Nicky’s Thai in Sewickley. I had Khao Soi and loved it. I’ll probably try to make some at home.
• Tyler played Bon Iver’s 22, A Million on the record player while the fireplace crackled and snow flurried outside.
  • I enjoy the vibes that putting on a record gives, and love when someone puts one on when we visit, but I have no interest in getting a record player or collecting records.
• Making Black & Green Manhattans (Manhattans with Zirbenz) and tasting some double oak bourbon. Tyler recommended seeking out Old Forester 1910.
• Playing Trivial Pursuit. The guys won.
  • One theory of Poe’s death is that he was so distressed about being forced to participate in Cooping that he had a panic attack and died
• Playing Monopoly Deal. Amanda won.
• Just chatting and laughing with old friends.

Every time we visit Erin and Tyler I’m tempted to buy a Moccamaster or Bonavita coffee maker, but I’m stubbornly attached to our hand grinding and manual pour over.

Every year I try to get Erin and Tyler to blog, to no avail. Erin is an incredible artist and I think she’d write great blog posts. We share a lot of common interests, but completely diverge on the blogging front.

Some choice quotes from this year:

“No, I haven’t read your blog. In fact, I’ve never read any blog.”

“I don’t know what you internet people do.”

“The collective has a hard time getting people to document their work because we are all too busy actually doing things to blog about it.”

Erin

“Your blog is about nothing… I mean, you blog about whatever is going on in your life at the time…nothing in particular.”

Tyler

The drive back home was decent. Lots of rain, but Charlie was in a good mood and actually napped. Listened to Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. Had a surreal experience where I thought we were both an hour further ahead in the audiobook and an hour further in our drive than we actually were. Losing an hour while listening to a book that challenges our standard conceptions of time is weird.

We had a NYE get together at our house with Erica, Trevor, and Zoey.

• We made pizza in the Ooni. The dough came out great and was easy to work with. I’m getting the hang of the Ooni.
• We made Tiki drinks. Nui Nui (rum, cinnamon, vanilla, orange, lime) and Yuletide (tequila, cranberry, lime, orange).
• We had many appetizers and dips.
• Amanda made a toddler charcuterie board just for the kids.
• The kids made art and danced.
• Zoey made herself at home and tried to sleep on the couch when her parents said it was time to go home and go to bed.

It was a nice time. We started in the afternoon and were all in bed before midnight.

Over the break I finally finished the eighth book of The Baroque Cycle. The series took me two years to finish. Which giant Neal Stephenson book should I read next? I’ve read over half of his fiction bibliography so far. We’ll see what strikes my fancy in a couple months when I’m ready to start another, but right now I’m leaning toward Anathem.

I had big plans for overhauling this blog over the break, but didn’t do them. I took a break and hung out with my family instead. I’ll get to it eventually.

Christmas tree update: We added cranberries. We consider our tree a work in progress for all of December.

I got out in the shop and made some more ornaments on the lathe. That might be it for this year.

Charlie’s daycare class had a Christmas luncheon and Amanda made the menus and flowers.

We made some more Christmas cookies. Charlie stamped them. Using a circle cutter as a guide helped tremendously.

Charlie and I spent two hours exploring Depew park in a very open-ended way. As long as he wasn’t in danger or about to jump in the pond, I didn’t interfere with where he wanted to go. He loved it.

Charlie and I also took a night walk in the woods with his flashlight.

We sent out the last batch of Christmas cards today. We need to start writing them a bit earlier next year 🎄📬

Reading

I finished The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler this week and started Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig and Liberty’s DaughterArchived Link by Naomi Kritzer.

I joined a local Discord group and got included in some local Twitter lists. I am starting to feel like that was a mistake. The complainers tend to congregate there and complain together because no one else will listen to them. There they feel heard. Not really my kind of place.

To quote Frank Chodorov, “One is a crowd.”

I’m looking forward to some time off next week. I need it this year. The last six months feel like a blur to me.

That’s all I’ve got.

I’m blogging later than usual because during my normal blogging times I was either out in the workshop turning things on the lathe, baking Christmas cookies, writing Christmas cards, making natural Christmas decorations, or at a Christmas party. All good things. ‘Tis the season.

This year we had Emily at Fox Burrow DesignsArchived Link, a local artist, design our cards. Last year it was Kate at Happy Places.

The Christmas party in Lake Peekskill, hosted by our friends Jeremy and Marie, included live music and caroling. That’s Amanda on the flute, Jeremy on the piano, and Detra (who you might recognize from HONY) singing in the background.

I spent a couple evenings in the workshop this week making things. First some dreidels for Hanukkah gifts (see also), then some ornaments and a dry vase. A little helper came to visit.

It is really nice to get back out in the shop and make things again. Trying to make it a regular thing.

I’ve pretty much switched to the Arc browser now. I’m still getting my pins set up and a few work tools figured out, but it is a huge improvement over any other browsers I’ve used, except maybe for the web browser on Palm’s webOS. (That Palm Pre was by far the coolest phone I’ve owned.) See also.

We’ve been going to the library with Charlie every couple weeks to pick out new books. He loves picking some himself and insists on carrying them back to the car. In addition to the cars and construction vehicles, he loves Madeline. Très bien!

Some books he’s been enjoying:

• Madeline’s Christmas (which he calls Magawine Christmas)
• Construction Site on Christmas Night
• Construction Vehicle ABCs (which he calls Excavator Dump Truck Book)
• Cars Go

I’m not done with it yet, but Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a prime candidate for the best book I’ve read this year.

State of the Word looks like it went well today. I’m curious to see how the community responds to the Data Liberation focus. I played a small part in getting some things ready for that behind the scenes. More to come on that front later. I’m excited about this focus, as migrations are a big chunk of my job and better tooling would be a huge help. I’d love the end user to be able to migrate everything on their own without calling in our team!

The Interactivity API is also pretty cool. I love how fast the demo site is.

I’m also in love with the Playground project. I wish the blueprint.json convention there would make its way to regular WP installs. I’d love to send someone a json file to include with a blank WP install and have everything installed and generated in a matter of seconds.

I’m glad Matt mentioned the Friends plugin. I use it here!

I better get to bed. Toddlers wake up early. Thankfully Charlie started grinding our coffee for us in the morning!

This week last year:

A first for us: We decorated the Christmas Tree at 7am. That is when Charlie got up and was ready to go. We still need to dry the grapefruits to add to the tree. Every morning Charlie turns the tree on when he comes downstairs, and he turns it off before we leave. He loves it.

Charlie playing trains.

Charlie helping make Christmas cookies

We went to the Harvest Moon Orchard Festival of Lights on Saturday. They had lots of great displays and a well-paced, self-guided path with calming music. We enjoyed it. Charlie’s favorite was the tractors.

I’m surprised more orchards and farms don’t do something like this. I know it is a lot of work, but this place is raking it in on what is the typical off season. They not only charge for admission, but they have 3 refreshment stations where you can buy hot chocolate, coffee, and booze while going through the lights, then food and fresh hot donuts at the end. Quick napkin math, I expect they are bringing in at least $30K per night on the weekends.

One more for good measure.

I spent Saturday morning helping Jon frame out a woodshed at his place. We work well together. We usually drink our coffee and discuss the plan, then divide and conquer. We don’t waste much time.

I learned a new trick for squaring things like the bottom frames: The 3-4-5 rule. Mark 3ft on one side, 4ft on the other, and adjust until the hypotenuse is 5ft. This makes perfect sense, but I hadn’t thought to use it before.

I’m feeling the itch to redesign my website. The homepage and archive pages need it. I’ll probably start by surveying other blogs I like and taking screenshots for inspiration.

Reading

Amanda and I usually spend Charlie’s naptime on the weekends trying to get some stuff done around the house. Today we brewed some coffee, snuggled up on the couch together, and read for two and a half hours. It was nice.

• I just finished Candle by John Barnes.
• Currently reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler.
• Currently listening to the eighth and final book in The Baroque Cycle, System of the World.
• I gave up on the third book in the Red Rising saga. I liked the first, the second wasn’t as good, and just couldn’t stay interested in the third.

Spotify Wrapped 2023

For as long as Spotify has been doing Wrapped, Tycho has been my number one artist, and that hasn’t changed. Though, I’m thankful that Spotify opts out kids music, because Blippi or Twenty Trucks might have taken the top spot this year…

Some new artists made it in my top songs list:

• Frou Frou (an Imogen Heap project)
• Sudan Archives
• The Hold Steady

Some old favorites resurfaced this year:

• Mighty Mighty Bosstones
• zebrahead
• Mutemath
• Foster the People

Some are no surprise:

• Rancid
• The Strokes
• Less Than Jake

I made Japanese curry tonight, a cold weather favorite in our house. If you haven’t tried it, get some roux blocks and make a batch. We like the Vermont Curry brand, which is easy to find in the US. We make it with chicken, potatoes, peas, carrots, and onions, but it works well with ground beef or vegetarian, too. One batch is good for multiple meals.

Twelve Days of the Rings

Seven swans to rule them all,
Six geese to find them,
Five rings to bring them all,
And in the pear tree bind them

I’ve been mostly offline this Thanksgiving. I haven’t checked anything for work, checked Twitter (or Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads), read my RSS feeds, or checked any news sites. I did play Wordle, text some friends, and research microwave sales (the power supply on ours died). This was good for me, and I think I need to keep it going on weekends as much as I can.

Weekly Charlie photo dump.

Charlie likes learning about things, and recently anything with an engine is interesting to him. So I thought, why not show him our car’s engine? He liked it. He also loves starting the car whenever we go somewhere.

We joined the Richer family for Thanksgiving this year. It was nice enough that some of us opted to sit outside. Charlie and I also took a walk. Amanda and I were in charge of vegetables, so we made a dish of roasted butternut squash and a dish of roasted root vegetables (parsnips, rutabaga, onions, carrots, celeriac, and potatoes). With the leftover root vegetables we made a shepherd’s pie on Friday.

Charlie took his first train ride this weekend and he loved it. We took a short 20 minute ride up to Cold Spring to see how he’d do. Since he liked it so much, we think rides down to Manhattan are doable.

Charlie likes shopping at wholesale clubs.

I feel imbalanced.

• I frequently work evenings after Charlie goes to bed.
• I’m not reading as many books as I’d like.
• I feel a little bit stuck at work.
• We have some house & property projects we need to figure out but keep putting off.
• I find the two year old phase as challenging as it is gratifying. Watching Charlie learn and encounter the world for the first time is incredible. Teaching him new things is gratifying. Yet, the tantrums that come with him pushing the boundaries of his independence are incredibly frustrating. These past two weeks have been tougher than usual. Amanda and I are exhausted.
• My friend Jon asked me during Thanksgiving whether or not I’m turning any Christmas ornaments this year. I sheepishly said that I wasn’t and didn’t have time, but that didn’t sit right with me and bothered me the next couple days. I haven’t made much in my workshop since Charlie was born.
• I feel in a rut with what I’m cooking for dinner regularly.

In short, it is time to make some changes.

• I signed up for Automattic’s coaching program and scheduled my first couple coaching sessions.
• I spent a couple hours this afternoon cleaning my workshop, which I used as storage for most of the past two years.
• I made chicken stock tonight for the first time in almost a year.
• I reached out to my friend Scott Scharl about going through The Imposter’s Handbook together in the new year.

More I need to figure out:

• Get in a regular stretching routine so I don’t feel so tight all the time.
• Get back to regular meditation to help deal with frustration and anxiety.

I almost didn’t blog this week, but I think it is important to keep documenting things for my future self and keep putting things out there to start conversations.

I think a new theme is in my near future. Maybe using TT4. I’m trying it out for a project at work, so we’ll see how I like it. Looking at the current patterns, I think it needs one for a standard blog homepage with full content posts, so perhaps I’ll open an issue and put in a patch.

I’m sipping a Fall Back from Sasha Petraske’s excellent posthumous book, Regarding Cocktails, while writing this.

• 1oz Rye
• 1oz Apple Brandy
• 1/2oz Amaro Nonino
• 1/2oz sweet vermouth

Stir in a mixing glass with ice, strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass.

I started this year’s versions of 100 things and 40 questions. Doing them gradually over the next month should be easier than trying to jam in them between Christmas and the new year.

Busy couple of weeks. I didn’t write last weekend because I spent the whole weekend doing work around the house: Putting things away for the winter and mulching in the leaves outside, and moving things in the basement, garage, and attic in preparation for getting foam insulation in those spaces.

We were out of the house Wednesday through Friday morning to let the foam set and outgas. We got an Airbnb here in Peekskill. The house we stayed in was built around the same year ours was built, but not as well maintained. The basement was damp and dingy, the paint was peeling on a lot of trim, the floors were largely unlevel, and it had a base smell of old cigarettes (though obviously covered with a lot of primer.) It makes me thankful for our home.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what kind of difference the added insulation makes. Before we had bare rafters in the attic! I also need to put the weatherstrip on the doors and windows. The goal was to cap off the main place where heat was escaping (roof) and the weatherstrip will deal with the incoming drafts. Then we’ll reevaluate.

I’ve been bouncing around a lot with my book reading, starting lots of books that haven’t stuck. I think I’m scrolling too much on social media again. I started a new book (Candle by John Barnes), which I’m now halfway through. I credit that to putting my phone on the other side of the room while reading this week.

Attention span is a muscle and sometimes it needs retraining.

With it getting dark so early, it is time to start prioritizing morning walks again, as well as restarting my D3/K2/magnesium supplements.

WordPress Site Editor question: I know how to set default site-wide padding for certain blocks, but how do I pick which block style is default for the site? For example, for the Separator block, I want to set the Dots style as the default.

We attended a Friendsgiving at Meg and Jeremy’s on Saturday. Amanda baked a Milk Bar Pumpkin Pie cake, I made a punch bowl, and we made a sweet potato side dish. The kids provided the music.

We had a nice sous vide pork shoulder, pastrami and rye dressing, roasted potatoes with fennel, homemade butter, crusty bread, and roasted cabbage. Good meal!

An appetizer I enjoyed more than I expected was breaded and baked Boursin, served with water crackers. IMO much better than baked brie.

Charlie got to ride a pony again today after Amanda’s lesson. He was excited about it for the past three days. The English saddle was hard for him to hold on to, probably need a Western next time. I bet he will want to take real riding lessons in a couple years.

More Charlie photos from this week:

Charlie loves to be included and help with whatever we are doing. While we were picking the last batch of tomatillos for the season, I noticed that he liked peeling the paper off the outside, so when it came time to wash and peel them, I asked him to help. It kept his attention the entire time and he helped with the entire bowl. Afterward, he enjoyed sorting them into two different bags. (Ignore the messy sink and kitchen. We did dishes after Charlie’s bedtime, I promise!)

The Peekskill Library has a children’s room with lots of great books. Charlie enjoyed picking some out this week, so I think we’ll be there a couple evenings a month. We discovered that the deli the next block over also makes a great chicken over rice platter (which Charlie absolutely houses), so we go there afterward and pick up dinner.

This OpenAI situation is wild. I don’t have any commentary other than I’m looking forward to finding out more real details about why sama was ousted. Did Ilya get spooked by new research, try to pump the breaks while Sam charged forward, and coordinate the board to push Sam out?

Looking forward to more El Yud hot takes.

I love that the firing went down over Google Meet. Even OpenAI with Microsoft as a huge investor, doesn’t use Microsoft Teams 😆

I took apart my dryer for the first time today. It started making and awful squealing noise, which my Dad said is most likely the idler pulley. Changing that requires taking the whole thing apart, including pulling the drum out. I’m thankful that there were a few YouTube videos to watch and that Dad was available to FaceTime a couple times to answer my questions and talk me through a couple steps.

I wish I had paid more attention watching Dad take dryers, refrigerators, and ovens apart while I was growing up. Half the battle was trying to get the thing taken apart in the first place, and having seen someone do it would have made replicating that easier. That said, I probably did see Dad do that a couple times (I know I was always by his side, holding the flashlight, and interested in what he was working on), but seeing something 20+ years ago is tough to recall. I guess so much of learning is doing something yourself and figuring it out. Next time it will go a lot faster because I figured it out this time.

Charlie woke up from his nap and wanted to check it all out. I always appreciated my Dad being patient with me and showing me how stuff worked, so I took some time to show Charlie. He helped blow out the blower housing with the air compressor, too.

I’m surprised that old dryers, especially gas ones, don’t catch on fire more often, given how much lint gets past the lint screen and packed around the blower assembly and in the bottom. I took some time to vacuum the whole thing out and blow out the blower housing with the air compressor while I had it all apart.

When I put it back together, the squealing was gone, the drum still turned, and it heated up, so I think I did it right.

Charlie wanted to help me put the screws for the control unit back in. “I fix dryer too!” I got the final screws started and let him finish them.

I made a Digital Garden page for this:

I’m really excited about FeedLand‘s implementation of Reading Lists. The general idea that you can subscribe to an OPML file of feed URLs that gets regularly polled and resynced. So you are subscribing to a list of feeds rather than individual feeds, and you see the items from the feeds on that list in your reader. Cool stuff.

Since FeedLand generates OPML for each user, I’m also able to subscribe to other people’s subscription lists and their changes flow downstream to me. I’m busy subscribing to as many blogrolls in OPML format as I can find. That is where the best stuff comes from.

Back to work. It was a jarring rentry. The very first thing I saw when getting online Monday morning was a ping about an issue that had major customer impact. Talk about getting the adrenaline pumping.

It turns out GitHub and Cloudflare both had even bigger issues this week, too. And the time change didn’t even happened yet!

Not the smoothest week in the tech world.

Trick or treat was fun this year. We went to a friend’s house in Lake Peekskill and trick or treated as a group. Charlie really got into it and was pretty conscientious–he generally only took 1 piece of candy per bowl, and understood that it was communal, so he didn’t get upset when there were other people getting candy before and after him.

He dressed up as a cow (Amanda made his costume!) and Amanda and I dressed up as farmers.

We are really thankful for the friend group we have here. Really thankful.

Unfortunately, it looks like Charlie picked up RSV at daycare, so the end of the week and weekend has been tough. Tired, sick toddler with tired, stressed out parents.

I made this easy chicken noodle soup on Friday and I think it will be a new go-to when someone is sick. It is delicious and takes only 30 minutes to make. The secret is using ground chicken to speed up the process and retain flavor.

Easiest Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe – NYT Cooking

The majority of shortcut chicken soup recipes use rotisserie chicken It’s a convenient hack, but cooked chicken doesn’t absorb flavors very well On the other hand, sautéing ground chicken in olive oil with garlic, coriander and celery seeds (or fennel seeds and rosemary, or herbes de Provence) creates a deeply complex base

cooking.nytimes.com

I made some quick sheet pan meals this week, too. We have lots of sweet potatoes from the CSA right now, and those are quick to roast (peeled and 1in dice, 425F for 30 minutes) and tasty with paprika, garlic, and salt. Would probably be good with eggs for breakfast, too. Maybe I’ll do a breakfast sheet pan with sweet potatoes and bacon this week.

One of my favorite new follows on Twitter is Nico Chuan, who posts great in-progress photos of his carving process. I’ve learned some things about the process just from his photos that I hadn’t quite figured out in my head.

New favorite follow on Instagram: Ethan Neiderer, who makes skin-on-frame St. Lawrence River Skiffs. I thought they were ADK guideboats at first because they are so similar. The differences: No bottom board, all ribs are bent instead of laminated, and slightly different style of stem and deck. I’m comparing notes with Ethan soon and thinking of designing a hybrid style that combines the benefits of both the ADK guideboat and the St. Lawrence River Skiff. Not having to laminate all those ribs would save a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Starting the winterization process. I pulled the last of the ACs out of the windows today, swapped the screen door for the glass one, and picked up some weather strip, weather seal, and foam kerf for the windows and a few doors. I plan to put that on tomorrow.

I feel horribly behind on my reading and writing. I know that is all self-imposed, but I feel behind none-the-less.